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Hence drastically raising taxes on fossil fuels. The environmental costs of fossil fuels are nowhere close to being represented in the cost of fuel people pay, therefore we have this massive misallocation of resources.

But then society will have to vote for sacrificing luxury today for the benefit of future generations, which typically doesn’t go well.

You can't "drastically" raise taxes _just_ on fossil fuels though. You'll be "drastically" raising them on every single thing, disproportionately harming the poor.

The poor can be helped by transferring wealth from those that have it to those that need it rather than taking it from future generations’ environment.

Very easy to be generous with somebody else's money. What typically happens, though, is the ultra wealthy avoid taxation, and middle class ends up footing the bill. How much of your own net worth are you prepared to "transfer"?

Yes, geopolitical boundaries make the concept of wealth redistribution difficult to execute. Hence it typically happens via some type of destructive force, natural or man made.

However, it has nothing to do with the separate problem of creating a hostile environment (the physical world) for future generations which can only be avoided by reducing fossil fuel usage which can only be accomplished one way - increasing the cost of using it.

As far as how much personal wealth I’m willing to depart with, I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get people healthcare, minimum vacation time, sick leave, higher education, and parental leave.

This is why redistributionist ideologies are typically internationalist in nature. E.g. the third international and its siblings.

The problem is that the cost of environment degradation is only an economic externality to the fossil fuel producers and distributors. That means the poor are already paying for remediation. Moving the tax burden on to the producers is a zero-sum game: the cost of environmental remediation is still bourne by the consumer, but shifting the payments towards the source of the degradation is a governance policy that can shift the equilibrium of the system towards a more sustainable model.

It's a reasonable position and one of the options before those we have chosen to lead us. Then again, the argument "but muh munny" is a strong counterargument among those who own them.

> "but muh munny" is a strong counterargument among those who own them

As it will be for you, should you manage to accumulate any wealth.

I have plenty of wealth and no debt because I planned well over a long career. In general I get excellent value for my taxes, although I am constantly disappointed by their being funnelled into corporate welfare and subsidies for the rich. It's enough to make me cynical.

You can pair that with a welfare state to offset that as many countries are able to do

Seems a little extreme if our goal is just to get more people using public transportation.

Our goal is mitigating catastrophic climate change. Making cities more livable is just a nice side effect.

In that case I guess the best option is more lockdowns, or even better reduce the population through any means necessary. /sarcasm

I don’t see the sarcasm. Reducing fossil fuel usage can be accomplished in part by reducing the number of people consuming fossil fuels, as well as reducing fossil fuel use per person (which means less traveling/consumption).

Most people that would be removed by population control measures will have negligible impacts on the carbon emissions though. If you cherry pick rich Americans, Canadians, Australians and Saudis you might do well

No, more lockdown does exactly nothing to get us off our dependence on fossil fuel. On the contrary, wrecking the economy makes the changes needed less affordable.

Reducing population also only buys time. I think you already know both of these things.

America already has a welfare state (of sorts), it's not like they're talking about abolishing private property in order get more people on to buses.

huh? why not

1. Climate change already disproportionately effects the poor. They live in low lying areas that will flood first and are not well positioned to move when necessary. 2. Carbon taxes can be revenue neutral by giving everyone a equal portion of revenues as a tax refund.

So I have a weird opinion - cars are cheap, and give us time.

If your time is worth little, public transportation will work. But if you want to get from home to work and back, the car will be quickest. And if you want to go to the grocery store on the way home, no public transportation helps with that.

There are a few modifications of that.

If you have to get to work and you're not in a rush and you have something to do along the way like listen to a podcast or read a book, then that might be slightly different, because you're living a bit. (although podcasts work in the car if you are not against driving + listening - some people are)

Public transportation works really well when the roads are full full full. Getting from one side of Mexico City to the other quickly during rush hour is possible with the metro, not possible in a car.

That’s a very suburban opinion. There are many hours of the day for me where taking the train is competitive with driving on time and is significantly less expensive financially, even accounting for the fact that I own a car. The things like “being able to read” are ancillary benefits.

That's true of your personal car (if you're lucky), but cars in general are expensive and don't give us time. They just increase the distances people are willing to travel, and as a city-planning and economic side effect, increase the distances people have to travel. All while having terrible side effects on the climate and our health.

The other thing that doesn’t get mentioned is that when shared transportation models are dominant, they are just like any other local monopoly — shitty service and incompetent management.

The corporate performance of railroads in the 19th and 20th century are distinguished by comical poor performance, abusive practices and unrivaled greed. For all the faults, the industry around cars is highly competitive at almost every level.

The Japanese system works pretty well. Public transport here in Berlin is also not too bad.

japan has, i understand it, a bunch of competing private railways.

Wow I disagree with literally everything said here and this kind of thinking is exactly why public transit in the US is awful. Honestly, almost every single thing you said here is either flat out wrong or disingenuous.

This line in the article is the crux of the issue.

> The question is not whether the predictions of how they will behave are accurate, but what kind of behavior we want to have more of.

How we build determines what kind of environment we have not the other way around. People WILL sell their cars if they have good public transport. They will live in dense areas if they can. This has been the case in the US and all around the world.

P.S. I really cringe at you saying that cars are cheap while talking about your ski trips. You obviously have never been around poor areas of the United States. Go hop a ride on a bus on the south side of Chicago some time. Go tell the people who commute an hour a day by bus that they should just buy a car because its so cheap.

> They will live in dense areas if they can.

The immense popularity of the quiet suburb seems to disprove this statement.

> immense popularity of the quiet suburb

I get what you are saying, but there is so much more going on that makes them "popular", particular in the United States.

Firstly, is the cost of living in the suburbs is massively subsidized. In the coming decades this will become readily apparent as most of suburban America will not be able to afford its infrastructure. It is already starting to happen.

Secondly, the suburbs in America are often the only legal way to build. We've outlawed density in most of the country. Many of the most urban parts of our major cities are less dense than they were a few decades ago because of zoning changes.

Thirdly, we simply do not have good public transit. You may think that New York or Chicago have great public transit but they have substantially less per-capita ridership compared to many other equivalent cities.

I'd suggest looking to other parts of the world as examples of immensely popular dense development. In Asia, Tokyo, Singapore, many cities in China and across Europe are great examples of this. The U.S. is an aberration - not the rule.

There are also all of the downsides to living in cities (in the US anyway).

(high) cost, noisy neighbors (and poor insulation), zero design for ventilation or privacy. This isn't directly addressed in the suburbs either, but the lower density in the suburbs decreases the effects.

I've never lived in a shared dwelling that isn't an apartment though. Maybe the equally unaffordable condos and such in cities don't suck; however I'm inclined to believe that they share these faults and all of the distractions of others, particularly in cities with mostly US citizens.

I take the bus in Chicago, including the poorest parts. It's fine, I even prefer it to cars because I can't stand driving. The bus drivers consistently kick off trouble makers.

Logically solid points, having at the basis an axiom with which I definitely don't agree: in my opinion having a car does NOT have to mean using it for everything. Given the alternative of a usable public transport, of course. You're correct that the prices must be comparable, of course, but otherwise the car usage can be kept for heavy groceries and road trips - neither of which happen every day.

I would be interested to see a map of public infrastructure investment over time (such as public transport; amenities for sports, leisure, and recreation; convenience shops; zoning for increasing housing density) overlaid with the rise and fall of COVID-19. My gut feeling is that the density the environment, and the proximity to these facilities, is inversely proportional to the growth rate and total number of infections.

I'm not sure if I'm correctly parsing what you wrote, but at least where I live, COVID-19 managed in couple of days to revert years of effort to make the city car-sparse. The unfortunate truth is that public transport is the last thing you want to use in the middle of a pandemic.

What about bicycles? They're an excellent thing to promote in a lot of places, and can help a lot with reducing car use for short-medium trips. Also, truthfully I'm not sure PT has much of an impact on the pandemic - some of the worst hit countries have notoriously bad/non-existent PT, whereas others with world-class PT have very much controlled the disease.

I'll have to look into per-city stats around the world, but around me, the city with good PT managed the pandemic quite well by cutting PT capacity in half (and demanding masks on), removing parking restrictions, and doing various other things to incentivize people to start using their cars again.

How depressing for the post-pandemic world.

Bikes are great for able-bodied young people without babies, who live in flat cities with moderate weather.

We can argue about how 'flat' most cities are or are not (most cities have very large areas which are flat), but given that, anyone can ride bicycles. Have you been to the Netherlands? I've very rarely been in a city that couldn't have massive cycling improvements across most of its area. Other forms of transit can make up the gaps. I completely reject your 'able-bodied young people' comment as a reasonable assumption about how accessible cycling is.

> A `correct` model should be screaming to build public transport.

Haven't we just learned that being in close proximity to people in unclean settings is a big risk to public health? Public transit advocates are going to have to address and overcome that before anyone should listen to them.

And that's not even considering the massive decrease in commuting needs from distributed/WFH workforces.

No, we haven't learned that.

Plenty of non-US cities denser than NYC did fine. and NYC is also doing pretty well by now. Consider basic stuff like how much is spread before CDC switched to promoting mask usage.

Respiratory Pandemics are also relatively rare events. Sorry, but it's true. Meanwhile suburbanization and car use causes tons of air pollution which sickens people constantly. Integrate and I am sure the suburbs come off as causing more unhealthiness.

Recent wave in suburban eras (Forida) + whatever doom we'll face in the winter will also make the April NYC a fainter memory.

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The subway in particular has excellent air filtration systems, and there have been no super spreading incidents linked to it, so as long as it's less than rush our super-packed, it's fine. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/10/nyregion/nyc-...

Public transportation is awful. California keeps trying to implement it, but it's poorly maintained and no one wants to get rid of their cars. It's only preferable when no one wants or plans to go anywhere outside the preallocated / approved locations.

You don't seem to have addressed the needs of anyone who doesn't live in a dense city. How about suburbia? The midwest? Try walking a couple blocks in Phoenix, AZ in summer.

I really doubt that our government, state or national, is capable of maintaining a decent infrastructure. California is certainly a good example of the propensity towards failure. (Maybe if we try again, with some extra rules, they'll do better next time?)

> we do a very poor job making the alternatives attractive...until we can either make car ownership/use more expensive

I really hope that the solution to poor transportation infrastructure won't be making the part that works even worse.